Due to the recent daily deal and summer sale on Steam, Supraland got a lot of new friends. It had the highest player
peak since 2020 even.
If you haven't yet, please wishlist our upcoming game Supraworld which is in the works since 2021.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1869290/Supraworld/


Then next step for Supraworld is to finish act 1 (out of 4) by the end of august. At first we will test this version privately with a few people and then expand the testing group a bit. When we think act 1 is solid, we want to release it to Early Access. That might be in october. We'll see.

We go Early Access because
- the experience from Supraland was that making the game while people are playing it to be a great advantage for feedback and motivation reasons. Seeing people play what you're making, you are being reminded why you're actually doing this and try to give people a better time instead of working on something in isolation forever.
- we also simply need the Early Access income because we're working on the game for 3 years now and production is expensive.

If you now think, if we're only finishing act 1 after 3 years, acts 2-4 will take forever: no, there is a lot done in them too, but it's just lots of loose bits that are not connected yet. You will see stuff around the Early Access area that we'll block off for now though. Some might take that as a challenge.
Most of the work on the game is independent from the acts though. It's mostly fundamental stuff of the game mechanics, performance optimisations and things like menus; nothing act specific.

Every like on this post reduces development time by 1 minute, as usual. Really.

When Supraworld is done? I dunno! But I made this graphic with a vague estimate so you get an idea where we're at.
When the Fundamentals and Act 1 are done we can basically start playtesting up to that point, which would happen in the form of Early Access here on Steam.

Liking this post decreases development time by 1 minute.

-David

Today I have some screenshots for you from inside the level editor.

The development of Supraworld is now going for roughly 2 years and we're not as far as I had hoped but the quality is great! Remember, Supraland 1 was already finished after 18 months.

But Supraland was kinda rushed, not expecting to sell more than 10000 units. Way over a million players later we now have a team of hardcore Supraland fans working on Supraworld and I couldn't be happier about those guys.
There is so much love going into all the details of Supraworld, you will be able to feel that everywhere.

We're maybe putting a bit too much effort into a lot of systems even though we only need them once or twice. But we're trying to make the game moddable so you can easily build your own levels with our assets and tools. We're trying to make all the little placeable gameplay scripts easy to use and I even put effort into making them look good in the editor, the things that no player ever sees.

It won't be Mario-Maker-easy to use, it's too complex for that. It's not a casual thing for everyone; you really have to mean it but then you can create your own Supraworlds and share them.
The main menu is supposed to have a "Custom Levels" category for this, but I guess it's one of those things that will be added after launch as it's not our primary focus of course but we always have it in mind when creating new things.

Some of our little scripts in use:
We're mostly done creating all the fundamental systems, which took us almost 2 years, so we can focus more and more on the actual game experience. Creating the world is the quick part really; the systems take all the time. So I expect development to speed up a lot.

This fluffy red guy has a huge fan:
I would like to talk so much about all the cool ideas we put into Supraworld, but we're making a huge surprise party for you all, so you really want to go in blind.

You can't even imagine what the solution to this will be:
My biggest development worry overal is the performance. The whole Unreal Engine 5 thing with its amazing lighting looks great on Youtube videos, but in reality it's not so perfect as it's quite demanding and many players don't have the latest hardware. There are 3 things I'm considering:

- Unreal Engine 5 is still improving, we're hoping for it to just perform better on its own over time
- Player's average hardware will get better until we release
- We might just need to offer 2 options: Raytraced and the old lightmap system. The latter would be a bunch of additional work and look less fancy but maybe it's necessary. We'll see.

Random supra meme in the middle of the post:
Wishlist wise Supraworld is doing great. We're about to hit 40000 and the magic number to cross, to be taken seriously in the Steam algorithm, is only 10000. This is your call to action if you haven't wishlisted it yet:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1869290/Supraworld/

Meanwhile the FAQ still applies for all the questions you probably have: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1869290/discussions/0/3843305689136654170/



The whole Six Inches Under on Console and Gamepass thing was not handled well and I'm super dissapointed. It's all fine now, but the launch was really messed up.
We ourselves have almost nothing to do with those ports, that's why it's especially painful when something that broken is released in your name. We had no worries because they handled the Supraland 1 ports super well.
The huge problem was that saving and loading basically didn't work at all. The game went through QA and it was all fine, and then someone made a last minute change that was so fundamental that it broke it all. Many months later it was finally fixed, and that took way too long as well, but the launch is the moment where you get the big attention, especially on Gamepass, which is very big for us to be in.
Really sorry to everyone affected by this mess. We'll be much more careful in the future.


-David

PS: Liking this post speeds up development, obviously.

1. We got the storepage up for Supraworld. There are lots of brand new screenshots to give you a glimpse.
Please don't forget to hit the Wishlist button to help support the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1869290/Supraworld/

2. Tomorrow (Thursday, 18. May 2023) don't forget to watch the Humble Games Showcase. It could be supra interesting: https://t.co/KoqCLVh73e

I keep getting Supraworld development news requests, but I don't have a lot to share.
Basically we're coming along nicely but slowly and I think it will be amazing, much better than the previous games.
Everything takes longer than the first game but we're building a very solid foundation for future games as well instead of yolo-coding everything into place, as I did with the first game. The old code was so messy that we could not really use it to build another game with it.

I plan to get the Supraworld store page onto Steam in mid May, for wishlist-hype purposes of course. The full release of course is not near yet but we're coming somewhat closer to Act 1 being playable, which could allow us an Early Access release, if that is something you would be interested in.

If you have further Supraworld questions, I'll answer them in the comments (unless you want spoilers that ruin the surprises).

-David

We're of course working hard on Supraworld. It's coming together slowly and I love every bit of it but I have nothing new to show at the moment. I am always holding myself back from posting new stuff we made that I would love to show around. But we're of course preparing a big surprise party and don't wanna spoil it!
But besides that I have a couple of other design documents. What else is to be expected from us in the future?


- I threw the idea of a Supraland remaster into the room with RTX and stuff and asked everyone what else they would improve on the game. But even my own list of things I would change, is so big, it became clear immediately that it would actually need a Supraland remake +, not a remaster.

With Supraworld we're still working into the blue and don't really know how everything will feel in the end because it's all really unique. But in Supraland, after having read about 8000 user reviews, after countless talks with players and after having watched 100+ people stream it, I have an ultra precise idea about all the game's pros and cons. At this point It would be concept wise trivial to make a much better version of it.

A little peak into my list of things I would change in a Supraland Remake:
- Have everything built out of real objects instead of looking like a normal size landscape (which it originally was until I decided to have it take place in a sandbox halfway through development)
- Each area needs a more distinct look (both things were not possible back then due to lack of assets and zero budget).
- Throw out all assets that were not original but bought from the marketplace (enemies, music)
- Some areas are too big and empty (Carrot town, Supraball pitch), others too linear (Volcano)
- My whole concept of puzzles has a improved a lot and lots of puzzles in the first game are just not that good anymore and could easily be replaced with better ones or improved big time.
- I don't wanna confront players with puzzles they cannot solve yet.
- I wanna tie some mechanics much deeper into the game; as they were only improvised into the game at a late stage and you can feel that (coloring, nom-nom flies, shooting through stuff with the blaster, shield generator bouncing, burning stuff...)
- All red barrels are way too pointless while the golden barrels matter a lot
- Story wise i would reemphasize certain characters way more early on (the Cousin, Mr Miracle, the endboss were just improvised into the game and not planned ahead in any way!). They could get more depth and foreshadowing instead of suddenly being there.
- A much clearer quicktravel system
- The combat balance gets completely lost after you get the blaster combo; it needs to stay interesting in new ways afterwards
- Generally more interesting enemies; I think the ones in Supraworld will be fantastic and they could even make a comeback or we make new ones
- A better way to deal with enemy spawning (we'll see how the new ideas work out in Supraworld and then draw more conclusions)
- Make the whole main progression less linear; let players choose which crystals they wanna go to in whatever order
- Eventually find a way to actually involve the big kid more (something I threw out of the window for Supraworld because there is just physically no room for him due to all the level design objects everywhere; it would have destroyed all level design if we kept empty room for him everywhere...).
- And lots of other little details...

Improving all the things in the old code would not make any sense effort wise. For Supraworld we're right now building all tools from the ground up and future proof (we think). It would be much easier to remake everything with them.

But even then the remake would be indistinguishable from the original Supraland, so it might just be its own thing with some heavy influences from the first Supraland game. Kinda like many Metroid or Zelda games that are new games but they take/steal heavily from their previous games to basically update the original.
[Edit] I see in the comments, many think it would be the same game again as the first; but no, it wouldn't. It would be a new game that might take the best bits from the first game, improve them and have lots of new stuff as well. You would barely recognize any of it.[/edit]


- But that is for a future that's years away. Our new code for Supraworld will also be kinda multiplayer ready, because everyone is interested in doing what we call "Twopraland", a Supraland coop only game.
We keep hearing the request to "pls add multiplayer", but that is technically impossible and design wise total nonsense because most puzzles would not be puzzles anymore when you're together.

By multiplayer ready code I mean that the code is now structured in a way that multiple players would technically not destroy the whole game because everything is referenced and modularized properly. A coop Supraland would require both players to get a different set of abilities and both need to work together to solve puzzles and find secrets. It Takes Two has shown the big interest in that kind of game, but it seemed so handholdy and made for like first time gamers. Ours would be less linear and actually be challenging as you can imagine.


- Anyway, I think right after the Supraworld development ends, the first thing we will do is to continue and finish work on a special little tower defense game that we already started earlier this year in our spare time and are kinda hyped about because it will add something unique to the genre. It goes by the development name of Supratower.


- I also wanna do an RTS Singleplayer game at some point. I'm not a multiplayer fan in RTS at all but I love for example the Command & Conquer campaigns a lot. I only make games when I think I bring something creative and new to the table. What I have in mind could be described as a Metroidvania-Realtime-Strategy-Game. The development name is Supra-Command.

Please let me know which of the projects mentioned appeal to you and also which do not appeal to you at all! I know why you are here and that things outside Supralands genre will likely not appeal at first glance to everyone.

And is there anything really important I did not mention in my list of things to improve in a Supraland remake?

-David

The central part of my game design philosophy is variety of interactions. It means: how many different ways are there to interact with the game world?
While making Supraland I wasn't that conscious about it, it was more of a subtle feeling that I tried to weave in. It worked well enough because I was working alone. But the more people I work with, the more I'm bringing those game design feelings to the surface and become more aware of them, because when you're discussing why a puzzle does not feel good, I need to justify it with good reasoning. So this is me trying to put one of my core concepts into words.

A common thing in games is, that your ways to interact are limited to causing damage, jumping, opening doors, pressing buttons, talking, managing your inventory.

That's like the default set for most games and I'm bored when I think about it, because what can I expect from the game after many hours if that's all there is and it's things I know inside out from other games? How can I still be engaged and surprised if I know I'll be killing, opening doors and pressing buttons all the way through?

The opposite of that are point'n'click adventures like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle. You never know what kind of things you will be doing and using with each other to cause totally different things to happen.

While in a generic open world adventure game nowadays you're roaming the world, picking up loot, killing badguys, evaluating skill tree options and watching cutscenes, in Monkey Island 2 you were trying to get a guy dirty to then steal his clothes from the laundry... and a bunch of other ingredients... in order to create a voodoo doll of him.

In those point'n'click adventures it's always unclear what you're gonna do next while in today's generic adventure games it feels like everything is kinda predictable from start to finish.

Am I saying that oldskool point'n'click adventures are absolutely fantastic? No, not at all unfortunately.
I think it's well justified that the genre has no more mainstream appeal nowadays and is kinda dead. They just pretend to give you freedom of interaction in their game world but they are actually so very limiting. You can actually only do very few things and what you can do is completely on rails. You can only do exactly what the game designer has planned for and not really approach things in a creative way. There is no possible way to deviate from the programmed progression.

The underlying ideas of what you're doing in those games are so much better and interesting, but their pure point'n'click gameplay is so very meh. What I feel I'm chasing is to put those cool ideas into a form of modern gameplay that gives you real freedom on how to interact.

For example in the old adventures you dragged an object from your inventory onto something else in the game world and it would either be correct or not. A purely binary thing.
In Supraland I want you to actually move those objects around, trying to make them interact.

In the old games it would just say "that doesn't work" while in my games you're supposed to see and feel exactly why it makes or makes no sense. It can sometimes even lead to solutions that were not intended. But even if it didn't work you should have had fun experimenting with the objects instead of just bruteforcing the binary options in the point'n click games.

A key aspect of my philosophy is that the player can legitimately suspect interesting interactions and combinations of objects everywhere. The acid, the sponge, the carrots, the flies, the balls, the lava, the color machine, people with certain desires walking around... there might be something useful when you use them with each other. That is where the magic is for me. Actually most game objects I just mentioned do interact with each other and some effects might not help you at all right now, but you're not on rails and you can make up weird stuff that no-one else did nonetheless.

If a game designer has no idea, they'll put a door in front of you and make you search the key or button.
In point'n'click adventures most of the time you try to trick an NPC which somehow blocks your progress.
It's much more interesting than a closed door if there is someone who doesn't provide you with what you need, because they think you are not from the correct family tree and then it's up to you to find a way to make that person believe you belong to that certain family. From that moment on you see the game world with different eyes.

The satisfaction comes from figuring out your goal on your own and also getting to the solution by yourself. The opposite happens in your generic open world adventure where an on screen marker tells you where to go. Even when it's detective work, you simply switch to your magic viewmode where you then follow a red glowing breadcrumb trail. After eventually finishing that quest I did not really contribute anything myself to the solution and feel empty. The game designers did not plan for me to do something smart at all.

Supraland 1 still had way more of those "activate button to open door" moments. It is ok sometimes, just if you overdo it, it gets really boring. So if you see lame button/key+door action in my games, come complain to me and remind me of my own words!

In Six Inches Under we experimented a lot more with other reasons (than doors) to stop your progress.
Like a guy doesn't let stinking people into town. Suddenly your own smell was a new element in the gameplay that you never thought about before. So the game world was recontextualized for this moment for you to figure out a way to get to that door without stinking.

One of my favourites moments was in Supraland Crash where a guard was waiting for his shift to end at 12:00 and you needed to make him believe it's that time of day to go home. The interaction you needed for this was something you've done many times before, but in this case it had a new context which made it an absolutely unique thing you've never done before or afterwards in that way (I'm not gonna spoil it here!).

And I guess that sums up what I'm after: the games should allow for new and interesting interactions with the world all the time and not just 'open door' or 'kill monster'. It is much harder for us to come up with that stuff as there is no formula to follow. But it's worth it.




Meanwhile Supraworld's development is going really well, I'm really happy with everything we're making quality wise and idea wise. The code takes longer to make but it's really clean and future proof. But sadly barely any bit of the game is coherently playable yet, as we're remaking the whole code and lots of fundamentals are still being worked on.


We're designing lots of puzzles together all the time and lay them out in the world. Lots of places are planned with their functionalities, but we can only build the environment without the functionalities right now. Designing the puzzles is a very fun process with such surprisingly good results. It's much better than when I was designing the puzzles by myself in Supraland 1. Throwing our ideas back and forth keeps making each puzzle better and better. And I can't think of any buttons that open doors yet. We're always challenging each other to find another way to make the puzzle at hand useful. If you see any "box on button that opens door" in the final game, it's because we really could not think of anything else.

Anyway, the puzzles in my opinion are gonna be much better than previous ones as we're never settling for "ok" puzzles. When I had to do everything by myself I was just too stressed out to spend too much time thinking through everything multiple times and to later severely change things that were not great.

The only part I kept making big changes to was the first hour, because that's clearly the most important one. Many other regions in the game were kinda rushed together and I kept the first draft because it was good enough.

The barrels from SL1 make a return, but they look different:
Supraworld is supposed to have 3 or 4 acts. The current goal is to get act 1 playable. The worldbuilding is mostly there, but the interactions are only like 30% there. When act 1 works we have the possibility to bring this into early access and have everyone involved in the feedback process who is willing to play a very unfinished game over and over again.
I would suspect the actual release is in 2024, but what do I know at this point besides "we're done when it's done" and "things that much longer than I expected".




Under the floor planks:
In a drawer under the bed:
Green carpet:
(If you rightclick the images and open them in a new tab, you see them in full resolution)

-David

- Added Dual Input Profiles setting (bottom of keybinding menu): Allows using Keyboard and Controller at the same time ⌨️ 🎮
+ Other small things

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1522870/Supraland_Six_Inches_Under/